The assumption behind this kind of sloganeering is that Verdi's librettos are stodgy and ridiculous. With their wild coincidences, improbable deaths, and hyperventilating exits, they do seem silly at first glance. Even the most artful synopsis reduces a plot-heavy work like "Simon Boccanegrà' to gibberish. And surtitles are of only limited value: while they help to draw the audience in, they also place far too much stress on the words, which are raw material for sing- ing rather than freestanding literary texts. (It would be similarly unnerving if song lyrics were projected at a rock show, useful as the service might be.) Only when the performance is under way does the beauty of the libretto snap into focus. Verdi's beloved maledictions, vendettas, and forces of destiny actually add plausibility rather than take it away; they make the violent accents of operatic singing seem like a natural reaction under the circumstances. If directors were replacing nineteenth- century conventions with riveting sce- narios of their own, then their attacks on Verdi's stageworthiness, however ar- rogant, could be set aside as so much bluster. The fact is that most of them display the faults they assign to Verdi: their work is, more often than not, stilted and cryptic, as if obeying some extrater- restrial social code. The Met's produc- tion of "II Trovatore" last season, for example, was so monumentally opaque that the director, Graham Vick, later re- moved his name from it, in the spirit of the ' en Smithee" movies that are pe- riodically flushed out of Hollywood. Here are some notes I made at the time: "Toy soldiers, colorful costumes, but no sets to speak ot Rorschach patterns? Sliding walls-inept. Enough!" Vick's fiasco was mild in comparison with what has been appearing lately on European stages. The opera world was recently buzzing over a "Ballo in Maschera," in Barcelona, that opened with an added scene of conspirators sitting on toilets and went on from there. Productions of this kind invite out- rage, and the best response is to ignore them. More interesting are the produc- tions that go subtly, incrementally wrong. One such was a "Rigoletto" at City Opera, under the direction of Rhoda Levine. A lot of it worked-at least, early on. John Conklin's sets, for example, nicely displayed the operàs contrasting social worlds, with the Duke of Mantuàs palace dominated by a gaudy red, and Rigoletto trapped in gray brick middle- income housing. We seemed to be in a stylized space between the Renaissance and the present da There was an ef- fective visual elaboration of Gildàs cen- tral aria, "Caro nome," with sinister fig- ures hovering in the background. "Caro nome," like "La donna è mobile," is more complicated than it appears; for all its sweetness, it has an eerie unreality, and the soprano's coloratura can come off as so much whistling in the dark. At the end, tremolo strings glisten like the threads of a spiderweb in which Gilda is about to be trapped. But the production got fidgety as it went along, and at the climax it lost the plot entirel As Rigoletto despairs, we see the assassin, Sparafucile, kicking back in his apartment, having a beer. Then the Duke himself wanders in and joins him. None of this is in the libretto, for good reason. We don't need to be told what Sparafucile and the Duke are doing next: they are stereotypes, albeit ricWy detailed ones, and they will go on playing lethal games with other people's lives. The bigger problem is that Levine's pantomimes detract from the dénoue- ment of the story: Rigoletto is the one character who is permitted to look into himse and in the final scene the gov- erning irony of his life is revealed to him: his public role, that of cruel jester, has ru- ined his private one, that of protective father. This is Sophoclean irony, and it is a comedown to see it paired with the kind of sardonic twist that passes for irony on cable TV -an assassin relaxing after his kill. Directors like to claim that the con- ventions of Italian opera are hackneyed and that contemporary audiences need novel reinterpretations if they are not to grow bored. Operagoers are pictured as jaded fanatics who cannot stand to see another mad scene or midnight oath. There are, of course, such people, and they get a proper thrill when Macbeth comes on in Sex Pistols regalia. But many others, especially those coming to opera for the first time, like the old stuff They want to see frenzied states of mind, bizarre occurrences, a mother ac- cidentally throwing her baby on the fire. The directors themselves are the bored ones. They need to make a statement and, afraid of embracing anything posi- tive, set about attacking an imaginary establishment. Verdi, the melancholy patriot, sends them into conniptions of negation. All they can do with his patri- 0tism is to mock it; all they can do with his despair is to trivialize it. Director-dominated opera is known as Regietheater, and it is telling that the word exists only in German. Regietheater first became popular as a way of evad- ing unsavory political associations cre- ated by the work of Richard Wagner, and, once again, the invidious compåri- son comes into pla Wagner's hypnotic world-weariness can serve as a sound- track for almost any set of images: Nordic gods, Nuremberg rallies, ' poc- alypse Now:" Verdi, on the other hand, is the most site-specific of composers. His arching phrases imply a certain mode of address; his rhythms a particular way of stalking to and fro; his orchestration a certain kind of space. For his shattering ironies to come through, you need to start with a veneer of ordinariness In "Un Ballo in Maschera," the entire ac- tion is predicted in the opening bars, in which carefree music in a major key is shadowed by chromatic passing tones. A lot of productions are masked balls from the outset, so you never know when any- one is putting on a disguise. For too long, opera directors have got away with installing themselves in the progressive zone of musical life, dismiss- ing all resistance to their work as anti- intellectual conservatism. In truth, they are the dumb, lumbering establishment, the ones with the tired script. The time has come for opera people to just say, "Basta." And the most effective protest will come not from critics and audiences, whose grumbling can always be ex- plained away, but from singers, without whom nothing can happen. A Verdi aria is like a camera that zooms in on a person's soul. Take the moment in "La Traviatà' when Vio- letta, the fallen woman, leaves her lover, Alfredo, under pressure from his father. Alfredo believes that she is merely going into the garden, but he will soon receive a letter saying that she has left forever. "I will always be here, near you, among the flowers," Violetta says to him. "Love me, Alfredo, as I love you. Goodbye."When THE NEW YOR.KER., SEPTEMBER. 24,2001 85